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Don't kid yourself, the security forces have been monitoring for years, Carnivore started in 1997. I don't think many people have qualms about the spooks looking for nutters with explosives from their IP traffic.

Its just time to start opening the data up to regular law enforcement agencies so that they can openly take to court all you criminal copyright thieves and put you in jail. Because we all know by now that 'home taping kills music' and that copyright infringement is 'Terrorism' or 'Pedophilia', just ask Hollywood or the RIAA.

You might feel that this is a little excessive, especially as the next tier of petty bureaucrats to be given access to your traffic will be Local Government and Social Service droids. Don't kid yourself that the Sheeple are going to object to this, after all it will be done to catch 'Terrorists' and 'Pedophiles', and anyway Facebook will be telling them what to think by then anyway.

Isn't it weird how we fought a cold war for half a century against totalitarian communism and now we are becoming totalitarian democracy's.

By copying music, you are creating more playable media.Therefore the copied music will be played more often.Which means more people will be exposed to the copied music.This will result in more people bying the music they just heard.By definition, copied music is music that has already been released in some original form.People are now buying music by artists that already released music.They don't equally increase spending on artists that have yet to release music.It is within reason to assume current children will want to make and release music in the future.Therefore, copying music is basically screwing children.Copying is pedophilia! It is logically proven.

But this can be done. Ban all encrypted traffic not specifically authorized by the authorities. This way, the first SSH/VPN connection to somewhere, and the cops come knocking at your door. Those using Wifi will be limited to plain HTTP, enough for the feeble (Facebook people) to post and check their accounts.

The big "trusted" media companies can be granted exceptions for their DRM in exchange for having server-side monitoring software (backdoors) installed in their systems.

The passive Pirate Bay-style of trying to run circles around government Internet policies will fail in the long run, unless accompanied by some sort of active political resistance, be it Net-only site "black outs" or flesh-and-banner street protests.

I haven't tried it, but I don't see any immediate technical hurdles to writing a web service to do torrent-like file transfer over HTTP

No, if they wanted to control this, then they'd need to lock down the client properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing [wikipedia.org] would be the way to do it, ensure that only 'proper' commercial organisations could write software that could be installed on the average PC.

I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

Easy way is to limit "overseas" access. Australian limits on Internet were quite... low - think 10GB-ish. But the catch was that if it was within country, it was "free" and "unlimited" (hence a lot of local mirrors and Steam and other services being colocated there). So any attempts to use an outside VPN mean that you're just using up your quota faster.

If the ISPs have to put their prices up you can bet a few more people might hear about this stupid law. The average Joe/Bruce will accept this in the name of saving the babies so long as it doesn't directly cost him more money. Tell him it's an extra five dollars a month and he might start saying "no".

It appears you think that when law enforcement seizes items for evidence that they pay full retail price for the goods instead of just taking it away. The only "charges" in your example above would be the fines or time served for contempt of court or some sort of obstruction.

I agree - random ISP lookups all day long and random , plausible emails to random names.

Back in the old days, when HTTP was just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye, email programs used to randomly add trigger words (eg. 'bomb', 'nsa', 'plutonium') to all outgoing mail then automatically strip it off again at the other end.

I assume it was done as some sort of hacker joke but we should start doing it again. Any sort of government fishing expeditions through user traffic needs to be made completely futile.

Unfortunately most people send their mail via large corporate software so the chances of it

“Crooks and terrorists will just use encryption or secure services to provide nothing but meaningless data - it's Mr or Mrs Average whose lives could be turned upside down by data breaches or bureaucratic spying.”

Now if only that quote had come from the Attorney General, instead of Electronic Frontiers Australia...

To which we respond: "Silly, why are you wearing those clothes? Do you have something to hide? Must be drugs / pirated software / Korans. Now off with them, put on some of this baby oil as we get the camera (for your mugshots, and we will be taking a number of them today) ready."

I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?

No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.

If you think Tony Abbot wouldn't give the AFP and other law enforcement agencies the same deal (i.e. mandatory data retention by ISPs so they can catch the "bad guys"), you clearly dont know Australian politics.